Where Did Nature Go?

In the Spring 2007 issue of The Threepenny Review, Elizabeth Tallent reviews D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, by John Worthen. Lawrence and his work are unpalatable, and I know nothing about Tallent except that she likes Lawrence a little too much, but at the conclusion of her review she makes a provocative assertion:

“Losing Lawrence, we relegate his list of necessary relationships – with `stone, earth, trees, flower, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures’ – to outworn modes of fiction. If young writers can rarely name more than a dozen plants within a ten-mile radius of their writing desks, this isn’t seen as detrimental to their work’s verisimilitude, since the nonhuman world plays almost no part in contemporary fiction. It’s as if this silence in fiction anticipates a hundred thousand species’ extinction in the actual world. Lawrence would be enraged.”

Fortunately, we can disregard Lawrence’s rage and his nonsense about “blood consciousness” and still take Tallent seriously. She’s right about the “denatured” state of American fiction. Our national library, fiction and nonfiction, at least from Emerson to Faulkner, is dense with casually deployed knowledge of the natural world. Even housebound Emily Dickinson knew her wildflowers and birds. While Pynchon’s novels are freighted with lore from a dozen disciplines, and he can joke about “a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof,” it’s all a goof – nature as postmodern shtick. Our writers have come a long way from Shakespeare, who was no botanist but names more than 175 plants in his work.

For many of us nature is a “recreation option,” like softball or video games, or an intrusion, like mosquitoes and dandelions. Our gaze is inward, our surroundings artificial. As a result nature writing has become a marketing genre, like romance. Edward Abbey is gone. Edward Hoagland, John McPhee and Annie Dillard remain, but even they were never strictly nature writers. Most of the rest can be divided into nature mystics and nature pedants. Both camps are self-conscious, humorless and polluted with politics.

I suggest Thoreau as an alternative, a nature mystic who, through discipline and study, evolved into an able field biologist who supplied Louis Agassiz with specimens, and our best writer on the natural world. Thoreau systematically taught himself botany, using the textbooks and field guides of his day, and weighed what he learned from them against what he saw in the fields and woods around Concord. His first use of a plant’s Latin name in his Journal seems to have been on Sept. 12, 1842, when he identified climbing hempweed as Mikania scandens. He was 25, a Harvard graduate and, more importantly, a dedicated autodidact. In a Journal entry from Dec. 4, 1856, he writes:

“I remember gazing with interest at the swamps about those days and wondering if I could ever attain to such familiarity with plants that I should know the species of every twig and leaf in them, that I should be acquainted with every plant (excepting grasses and cryptogamous ones), summer and winter, that I saw. Though I knew most of the flowers, and there were not in any particular swamp more than half a dozen shrubs that I did not know, yet these made it seem like a maze to me, of a thousand strange species, and I even thought of commencing at one end and looking it faithfully and laboriously through till I knew it all. I little thought that in a year or two I should have attained to that knowledge without all that labor.”

As Thoreau’s knowledge grew, the easy moralizing so common in his his early Journal entries diminished. Some readers lament Thoreau’s evolution into a proto-scientist, and even Thoreau himself had misgivings. In his Christmas Day Journal entry for 1851, he writes, “What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination?” And the following July 13, he writes in a letter to his sister Sophia, “I have become sadly scientific.”

For Thoreau, learning his surroundings, accurately naming its components, was an expression of his truest vocation: writer. A writer catalogues his world by observing and collecting its details. Readers and critics pigeonhole Thoreau according to their own hobbyhorses: naturalist, environmentalist, abolitionist, vegetarian, anarchist, Yankee crank, saint. He was all those things, of course, but essentially a writer.